The following fan-fiction is based on the story of Hogwarts Legacy, a spin-off property of the Harry Potter franchise and the highest selling videogame of 2023. It seeks to speak on issues foundational to the Harry Potter world, and by implication, our own: sex and gender, family and history, class and wealth, madness and magic.

This story is dedicated to trans people, who hold the most ancient magic.

Content warnings for suicide attempts, cancer death, and transphobic violence

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Book One: A Boy In A Dress

December 1, 1891, Aranshire, Scotland

Jane landed lightly outside the clapboard house, stuffing her broom into her bag. With a pass of her wand she transfigured her skirt into pants and conjured her Slytherin robes over her jumper. Defiance made no difference; Umbridge would just transfigure her skirt herself if Jane didn’t do it for her. She was accustomed to adults altering her clothes without her say.

“Ah, Mr Thorn,” Umbridge said, sat sipping tea by the fire. “There you are, just on time. You know the routine.” She turned back to her detective novel and pointedly ignored Jane.

Jane sat, back to the window. She dropped her wand into the pencil-holder, picked up the black pen laid on the notebook of cream parchment before her, and began to write. The pen sang smoothly, always seeming to cut the paper like a scalpel. Crimson letters flowed. The woman is the producer of the large gamete. She felt the familiar sting of shallow slices opened about her wrist, words sliced into a scar of words. Blood bloomed and was sucked away, and the cuts healed as quickly as they came. Her skin was red and taut as an infection.

An insignificant pain. She barely noticed it, her mind elsewhere. She pushed through the lines as quickly as she could while keeping them legible. Her mind drifted as her wrist burned. She had problems to solve. Lives were in danger, and not merely her own. She had to find a way to save them.

~

There had been a time when her life meant nothing to her, of course. Until a mere six months before, her days had been a grey haze for years, and she had waited patiently for death.

She had been born Jacob Thorn, youngest son of the Family Thorn. Ancient scions of the Ravenclaw blood, the Thorns were founded nine centuries ago when Ilexia Ravenclaw, Rowena’s little sister, married the Muggle Baron of Lockwood, Hederus Thorn. The pair built the tall black tower in the North Yorkshire moors called Caer Kilton, Jane's childhood home, and populated it with the children and grandchildren that became the Thorn line. Her family was respected, well-connected, had everything a wizarding family could want. Her parents loved her fiercely, unconditionally; her father Daniel, magician’s lawyer, member of the Wizengamot, doyen of the magical world, her mother Divorah, a fiery redheaded Fawley by birth and healer at St. Mungo’s by trade. Her brother and sister loved her, bemused and annoyed by her; Matthias, rookie curse-breaker at Gringotts and archetypal lad; Eirenn, newly appointed Junior Undersecretary to the Head of the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes, proud and clever and the sharpest Thorn on the vine. They loved their youngest son, their little brother, but Jacob had never shown any hint of the unconscious magic that all magical children display. He’d never accidentally blown up the breakfast table or transfigured his teddy bear, and after his eleventh summer had come and gone with no Hogwarts letter, everyone knew for certain that Jacob Thorn was a Squib.

He had, of course, been trying to do magic all his life. How could he not, with a family like his? As long as he could remember, he had wanted nothing else. Night after night he stole his father’s wand from his bedside table, purple-faced with concentration as he murmured lumos in his dark bedroom, then returning it, despairing, before the dawn. Day after day he stared at candle wicks until blood vessels burst in his eyes, willing them to light with a glance like his mother could, to no avail. Magic fascinated him, consumed him. The Caer was a library older and deeper than Hogwarts itself, a labyrinth of Undetectable Extension Charms far bigger inside than out, and he’d spent his life reading as much as he could: modern manuals bound in cloth and illuminated manuscripts trimmed in gold and cracked papyrus scrolls from Pompeii and Alexandria and even a few clay tablets full of wedge-letters, kept in cushioned boxes with translations in Middle English from Thorns long dead, devouring them all out of sheer curiosity and longing for the magic he saw everyone all around him doing all the time, which he could never do. He knew every incantation he’d ever read by heart, from accio to veraverto. He knew the deep theory, that magic could be cast without a wand, that wands were in fact a relatively recent invention a mere two millennia past, that with will and desire enough, magic could be channeled through nearly any object - a stone, a cup, a knife, or the most ancient tools of man, the eyes, the tongue, the hands. He knew that incantations were not universal instructions set in stone but merely crude keys to unlock the unconscious, able to be parsed and rebuilt at will, and that the most ancient or powerful magicians didn't use them at all. He hovered over old cut gems and silver goblets for hours, willing them to life, muttering nonsense words that felt right, before giving up, and weeping himself to sleep in the dead of night. Anything, anything at all, the smallest spark, would have given him hope. But there was nothing. His mother had him examined at St Mungo’s for signs of an Obscurus, terror and guilt in her eyes, to no avail. Even the toy broomsticks that he’d had as a baby, that imparted the weightlessness of a bubble as soon as they touched the root chakra between the legs, had never worked for him, his family exchanging dark glances as he cried. He was earthbound, while everyone else flew. Jacob was a Squib; everyone knew.

He had dreaded the summer of his eleventh year for a long time, knowing that his parents whispered contingencies behind his back, plans to send him to a Muggle boarding school in York if he didn’t get his letter. He had braced himself to receive only silence from Hogwarts, and had even allowed himself the faint hope that it would come as a relief, that at least, finally, he would know for sure. And when that summer had come and gone with no Hogwarts owl, when each day had stretched longer than the last while he watched the sky for an owl that never came, when his parents had begun to research Muggle schools, it was no relief. It was worse than he could have imagined. The pain, the despair, he could not articulate. His life meant nothing, if he could not do magic. There was no longer anything of interest to him in the world. His food tasted of wet ash and he ate only because it would make his mother stop speaking to him. Days stretched endless as he watched the sun track across the stone floor, his family at work, left to his own devices until his parents could come up with a plan. He woke up one cold autumn day and knew he could not wake up one more. He waited until his parents left for work, ate breakfast with too much jam on his toast, and then climbed the last spiral staircase to the roof and leapt from the high battlements of his home. For a moment that seemed like an eternity he had flown, and wondered, his mind as thick as honey, if this was what magic was like.

He had awoken a day later in his bed. By chance - or perhaps, she reflected, by magic - he had fallen in a thick clump of heavy gorse and had not quite died, his spine shattered, both of his legs broken. The family eagle, Gweihir, found him and fetched his mother, who mended him in a trice and wept for a fortnight. It was decided that it was a cruelty to keep him in the wizarding world, that he must be among children he could relate to, and that as soon as he was able, he would go to St. Peter’s School, a Muggle boarding school in York. “It’s older even than Hogwarts!” his mother said, attempting to entice his enthusiasm, knowing his love of the ancient and storied. “Founded in 627!” She took an indefinite sabbatical from St. Mungo’s, and for a year she shadowed his every move. She sat with him during the day and pored over Muggle books she brought from the Muggle village of Middlesbrough, teaching herself Muggle history and Muggle “science” as she tutored him. She brought Muggle tricks and contraptions like “matches” and a “bicycle” and fell over trying to ride it down the long halls of the Caer, prodding and joking with him to try. She tucked him into his bedroom at night, the windows covered in conjured bars, caterwauling charms on his door, with a tight hug she held too long. It was endearing in a way; she was so afraid to lose him that she caged him. His father was bewildered, hurt, carefully distant; he handled his son gently, as if he had a broken bone, and never asked him any hard questions. After a year of this, on a clear September’s day, Jacob left for York.

He spent the next two years in a haze, something that felt like a dream. The school was an ancient grey pile populated by dour boys and dourer men. He went to his classes and did his work and learned nothing. The names of his classmates slid through his ears like water down a drain, out and away to sea as fast as they came, the only interest about them their handsome faces and growing muscles, which he eyed uneasily, flushing. He returned to the Caer on holidays and for summers. His father would arrive in his curiously long and flowing grey suit, on foot, and together they would walk until they were out of sight, then his father would grip his hand and pull him into a side-along Disapparition. The sensation of Apparition - one completely unique, a sense of incredible pressure and stretching - came to entangle a complex of feelings, a deep pain and joy, a yearning of being in two places at once, in exactly where he wanted to be and in the furthest place from it possible. He remembered almost nothing of those two years but that feeling, and the feeling of unfathomable betrayal when he saw his parents, who loved him enough to send him away.

Everything had changed one night not long after his fifteenth birthday, home on a summer holiday. Sat in his dark four-poster, long after everyone had gone to bed, reading by candlelight an old novel about a girl who masquerades as a boy to become a knight - The Woman Who Rides Like A Man, by T. Pierce - he wondered idly, what if I was a girl? And the bedsheets had caught fire. In the ensuing chaos - his mother rushing in at his scream, putting out the fires with a pass of her wand and healing his burns with a dittany salve - he had quite forgotten what he had been thinking and made no connection between the fleeting thought and the flame. His mother assumed he’d fallen asleep and knocked over a candle. But the next morning at breakfast a barn owl swooped through the window and deposited a letter before him - addressed in neat crimson letters to Jacob Thorn, Caer Kilton, The Breakfast Table. His fingers had shook as he turned it over to see the Hogwarts crest, and when he thanked the bird his voice broke. “Just doing my job,” it croaked, and stole a piece of bacon. His father and brother were rhugchostomes, able to understand Rhuglossy, the language of birds, a gift common among the Thorns, but Jacob had never had the gift, never understood any of the keening conversations they had with the whirl of owls and sparrows that came through the Caer every day. But suddenly he did. His heart stopped as he read: We are pleased to inform you that you have been accepted at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

A late admittance - not unheard of, but very rare, the details of his arrival arranged by the Ministry and the headmaster. He was to be given a short remedial course in basic wand use by Eleazar Fig, professor of Magical Theory, before he was escorted to Hogwarts, where he would receive extra lessons in core subjects to catch up. His parents were jubilant, his siblings wryly surprised and congratulatory, but he was bewildered and frankly frightened. He had never done magic. He did not know why he had gotten his letter. He still could do no magic, could not effect the slightest change in reality. It had been a mischance, surely; his bedsheets catching flame was merely some twisted accident in an ancient, magical home, and the Quill of Acceptance had seen his proximity to it and assumed it was him. By some further fluke the Book of Acceptance had not slammed shut on the Quill as it wrote his faulty name - perhaps it had been asleep, or Confunded, or thought, surely not the scion of the oldest and wisest of magical families, surely not him. He would not be allowed by fate to endure his Squibbery in solitude; he would be forced before the world to put it on display. A Thorn! They would crow in glee. A Thorn, a Squib!

And yet, as the shock wore thin, he remembered the book he’d been reading and the idle question he’d thought and slowly, so slowly, like fog cleared by the sun, everything had been revealed. The very thought seemed madness, but he couldn't deny it: when he looked in the mirror and saw a boy, he was as powerless as a Muggle. But when he looked again, and deliberately, with effort, chose to see, in his pale face and long red hair, a girl, when his mental he became she… it all began to work.

A firm mental accio and whatever she needed zoomed into her hand, wand or no. A whispered impedimenta and every speck of dust swirling around the ancient tower room with its bright shaft of sun had frozen, as if in ice. She smashed teacups on the stone floor and repaired them with a snap of her fingers, over and over, giddy. What exactly about her was girl-like she did not know, but she knew that now it worked, it all worked. She made up for lost time with a vengeance, mastering the skills she’d watched her family employ every day, intuitively, lightning-fast, and it had nothing to do with any exceptional cleverness or great skill. Magic was an art, and it flowed like paint. She danced, and all the books in her room danced with her, and her tears floated off her cheeks like smoke. It was pure joy that drove her, utter gratitude, the lunacy of her long longing. She lit candles with a glance and laughed like a lunatic, tears streaming down her face. She hugged herself and wept more terribly than she had ever in despair, shaking, howling with something that was maybe glee, or maybe horror, or maybe the pure touch of God. On the high battlements in the dead of night beneath the dark, new moon, where once she had flung herself into death, she whispered expecto patronum, and a moonbright barn owl flew from her mouth swift as breath, the very same that delivered her letter. It wheeled in the night air, utterly silent, and when she touched a broom between her legs she felt her feet lift from the stones. She could fly. She had been given new life.

But when she tried to show her parents her progress, nothing. None of her spells worked. The accio she could perform perfectly, wordlessly, wandlessly, in the dark of her room simply did not work in front of her father’s patient, expectant eyes, not even when she resorted to shouting it aloud and borrowing his wand. He had smiled, and said no one ever got it on their first few tries. He promised her that he would get the hang of it, and she protested that no, it had worked, he had done it just last night. And so she realized, of course, of course - it was because she was not she.

Of course none of this could exist merely in her head, or her dark bedroom, or alone on the moonlit battlements. She had found the pearl of herself, a moonlight bird’s egg, a seed that held all the vast, starry sky. She had been transformed, or perhaps revealed. She had felt something sacred, something so much bigger than even magic, so much more important than a school. She had seen Truth; she had touched the spark of the Divine at her own heart. She had felt the touch of God, and that grace did not linger where did a lie. And it was now a lie for her to answer to the name Jacob, to let herself be called he. She couldn’t have it both ways. Girlhood was not something one felt, inside, while living the life of a boy. It must be lived. It must be performed.

What girlhood actually was, she had no idea. She knew that girls had different bodies, that they grew into women, that they could carry a baby and give birth, that they had vaginas, while she had a penis, while she could not get pregnant or have a baby, while her body would one day grow into that of a man. Somehow, none of this felt like what girlhood was. She knew it was arrogance, hubris, for her, a boy, to claim that girlhood was something she could define, and worse, define by a mere feeling. And yet she did. And yet she simply knew that girlhood - her girlhood, if no one else’s - was something ineffable, a sense of wordless right-ness. For her, it was a kind of graceful resolve, a quiet fullness. It was a carrying, a holding of something inside her - her world, perhaps. It was the wild moor winds tangled in curls of her red hair. It was the simple courage to claim her stake - one at which, she knew, she might be burned. She was no fool. She knew she would be thought mad.

When she came down for breakfast one day in a ratty dress she’d found in an old trunk, asking to be called Jane, her parents had been stunned so silent she thought she had Stupefied them. Her brother and sister saw that she had gone mad, a fate not uncommon in the Thorn line, and treated her with the caution and curiosity one would give any madman. She was mad, giggling and gleaming in her dark bedroom. But what she had found was a lifeline, infinitely fragile, infinitely strong, a spider’s thread she climbed up out of her hell. She had steeled herself against her family’s non-mockery, the things they would not allow themselves to think, let alone say. She felt the weakness in the pottery of their bond, eroded by the years of her Squibbery, crack. Even more so than before, she was irreversibly othered. She had been a dud, a Muggle born to mages, but then magic had come to her, with a terrible price: madness. Now she was so much worse than a dud; she was a tragedy. She heard her mother whisper, behind closed doors, that name - Alina.

Her aunt, Alina Thorn, her father’s little sister, an unparalleled witch who Jane had loved deeply as a child, funny and wickedly gifted and above all joyous in a way that Thorns rarely were, who had gone mad and died when Jane was nine. She had been fine one day, her normal laughing self, and then the next she simply broke with reality, grim and shaken, seeing things no one else saw, convinced of constant attacks, her magic suddenly dangerous and sporadic. One day she had infiltrated the Ministry, Stunning, Petrifying, Transfiguring, even Imperiating Aurors and janitors alike, dropping the Thorn name wherever needed, and confronted the Minister of Magic, Faris Spavin, in his office, holding him hostage for hours, ranting that he was in grave danger from a conspiracy of heliotropes, before finally being bested and arrested, by a team of five Aurors at once. She was a formidable witch, and she had become formidably dangerous, and something had to be done. Everyone wondered if she had been cursed, even Imperiated, but in the end St Mungo’s found tumors riddling her brain, deep cankers on her spirit that could not be Vanished or healed by anything less than a tear willingly shed by a phoenix, the rarest of remedies. Jane’s father had searched obsessively for a phoenix that might be willing to come, to meet her, to maybe, if they were lucky, feel pity enough for her to shed a tear - notoriously aloof, unfeeling birds that they were, even more so than most birds - but even Daniel Thorn, rhugchostome and pantophile, who knew absolutely everyone and everybird there was to know, could not find one. After a year, withered and haunted, eyes as wide and white as the moon, Alina had died.

~

Jane paused her pen, remembering. Her sleeve was damp with blood, and she was leaving a red smear on the pale wood desk. She pushed up her sleeve and quietly Conjured a white linen napkin with a twist of a finger, placing it under her wrist. Umbridge didn’t notice. The stain of her madness was not gone. She felt it, even now; her instability, the way she looked at Umbridge and bounced erratic between fury and pity, the way her magic sometimes flowed and sometimes foundered, and most frightening of all, the way it came fastest, strongest, when she felt the most mad. When reality shivered and seemed unreal, when the veil of death fluttered and she could see snatches beyond it, when she felt that wild laughter, when she howled and gibbered like a madwoman, that was when the world was at its most bendable.

But the world always snapped back into concretion. Even if changed, there was always a comedown, a consequence. After the revelation of her powers and her personhood, that joyous high leap in which the world could be bent, a Squib could become a mage as a boy could become a girl, she could not have been prepared for the reality that came next. She looked down at the bloody writing before her. Her wrist ached, a pain that swam into singing focus when she remembered it. Umbridge meant for the words, and the truth they conveyed, to be seared into her brain, but only the opposite happened; the endless repetition rendered them alien and meaningless. She may as well be copying the shape of a cloud, but even that would inevitably reveal some hidden, mystic meaning. The woman is the producer of the large gamete. She fell back into her memories.

Reality had marched on, and so had she, resolute. Her parents had delivered her to Diagon Alley on the appointed day, and Professor Fig had been gracious and charming. He helped her buy her supplies - books, cauldron, robes, and he gave her a secondhand wand and took her into an empty courtyard for a lesson in its basics, which she, of course, had to pretend not to know. She would get one of her own at Ollivander’s in Hogsmeade, he explained. He was curious when she explained that while her letter said Jacob, yes, her true name was Jane. She was clearly a boy, and clearly he saw, and saw her dress and her girl’s shoes, but he shrugged and seemed unconcerned. “That’ll be trouble at the school, of course,” he said. “They’ll try to put you in the boy’s dormitories. I’ll try what I can, but I don’t have much truck with the headmaster. It’s why I’m here to fetch you, in fact; he seems to think it a chore.” He smiled. “I don’t at all, of course. A late admittance! Late bloomers have historically been quite powerful. I’m very curious to meet you indeed.”

She wondered if she would take the Hogwarts Express - her parents had been among the first generation to ride it, and her father had told stories of her grandfather Albus raging when it was built. Unsanitary, unsafe, a vile Muggle contraption, he ranted. My parents lent me a broom and sent me on my way, but the Ministry had decreed that children took the train or didn’t come at all. She was nervous, but felt a strange bravery. She knew the train would be a proving ground; that she would be mocked. But she had magic, and she knew how to use it. She knew the key to it: so long as she called herself Jane, cleaved close to her madness, believed in her heart that she could bend the rules of life and boyhood, she knew she could bend the world. She found herself practicing a Shield Charm under her breath - protego, protego, she muttered, lifting the secondhand wand like a sword blocking a blow, a tight, bouncy film of force forming against imagined strikes. There was a thrill of eagerness, to prove herself. But in the end a carriage arrived, clattering down onto the cobblestones and pulled by thestrals. She was shocked to see the strange beasts, eerie and batwinged. She had never seen one before but in books. For a moment she wondered why she could see them - she had never seen anyone die. Alina was the only person she knew personally who had died, aside from various old wizards her father mentioned round the breakfast table, and she had died in St Mungo’s, far from the Caer and a child’s eyes. Slowly, as she goggled wide-eyed at the horsedrakes and Fig helped her load her luggage onto the back of the carriage, it came to her: she had seen herself die.

Fig had them wait for a friend of his, someone called George, a round, silly man, and once off the ground the two got talking about an old key George pulled from a pocket. She had been mildly curious, especially when apparently neither Fig nor George could see its moonlight glow - “An ancient magic,” Fig muttered, fixing her with an odd look - but then out the window, a shadow through the clouds, she saw like a dream the approach of the dragon. It wore a collar of goblin silver like a yoke, and before the observation had become oddity it had ripped off the back of the carriage and tore George in half. His entrails spooled into the air like party streamers as she fell into the void. The next moments were a strangely slow blur, a sensation that felt familiar, time thick as honey the same as when she’d thrown herself to her death. This time, rather than a dreamy calm she felt seizing panic; she did not want to die. A mad scramble for Fig’s hand as he scrambled for the glowing key, hoping that he would Apparate them away, between the jaws of the ground below and the dragon behind, and then the twisting of a Portkey and the snap of her leg and darkness.

She found herself in a cave, a spear of bone protruding through her thigh. Fig healed it with a green potion - a wiggenweld brew, he called it, as she resolved to always have one on hand in the future - and then he asked if she wouldn’t mind indulging his curiosity a little. She did mind, quite a lot, in fact. She’d just been attacked by a dragon, seen a man devoured alive, fallen nearly to her death and broken her leg. She wanted to go home to the Caer, immediately, and to try again for Hogwarts after a week of homecooked meals and quiet days spent reading old novels in her bedroom. But from Fig’s distracted, manic expression she could tell he wasn’t really asking. She had a feeling that if she said no, he would tell her to wait here for him, and God knew if he would ever come back. She certainly couldn’t Apparate on her own, she didn’t have a broom, her trunk with its massive Undetectable Extension Charm packed full of clothes and treats and tools by her mother was gone. If she wanted to go anywhere at all, she had to go with him. 

She followed him through a winding path along a steep cliff, somewhere off the west coast of Scotland, she guessed, the sea cold and wild below. She was freezing in her light jacket, her school shoes soaked through, her dress spattered with mud. Fig had cleaned himself up with a pass of his wand but left her to her own devices, likely assuming she could do the same, but her Scouring Spell sputtered and failed, her mind distracted, her focus non-existent. They came to a ruined tower perched on a crumbling sea stack, a place that looked like it was about to tumble into the spray any moment, and Fig blithely conjured a bridgeway to it and began to explore. Jane followed, picking her way carefully along, avoiding the rail-less edges as much as she could.

Once inside she saw that a portion of the inside wall had the same odd, moonlight glow as the key in the carriage. She groaned, and said nothing, hoping Fig would get bored and take them on to Hogwarts, but he seemed as determined to find something as a dog on the trail, and so eventually, reluctantly, she pointed it out. She rolled her eyes as he exclaimed gleefully, once again eyeing her shrewdly and muttering about ancient magic. She very much did not care. She wanted to go to school. She wanted a hot meal and a bath and a warm bed and an interesting class in the morning, but Fig insisted she touch the odd glow and the wall gave way. It was a portal. 

Fig practically pushed her through. He’d caught on, that she was the way forward, she realized with dismay, and the two found themselves in Gringotts, of all places, in what seemed to be a private reception room. Jane had been to Gringotts before, of course, but this wasn’t the white marbled front hall in Diagon Alley; this chamber was clearly far beneath the earth, marble columns and floor growing almost organically out of stalactites and rubble. A wizened old goblin in clerk’s shirtsleeves was dozing behind a desk. She had a terrible feeling. She wanted to beg Fig to go back, to take her to Hogwarts and then come back on his own, but the portal behind them was gone, and she knew there was no Apparating in or out of Gringotts, and Fig was already prodding the clerk awake. Her stomach dropped. 

Fig presented the clerk with the Portkey, acting for all the world like it was his own, and her stomach dropped further. The key did not belong to him, whatever vault it unlocked was not his to plunder. There was deep and terrible magic surrounding Ownership, and she knew for certain that Gringotts would punish those who claimed it falsely. Fig smiled blithely and nodded yes as the clerk asked if the key belonged to him, and alarms rang in Jane’s mind. The clerk shrugged and took them deeper into the earth, to an isolated vault - 12, the lowest vault number she’d ever heard of. He opened the vault with a pass of his long fingers and stood aside, a shrewd look on his face. Fig rushed in without a second thought, but she lingered outside.

“Don’t you want to go in, Miss?” the goblin asked. 

He called me Miss, she thought, stunned.

“Oh,” she said, flustered. Nobody had ever called her Miss before, unprompted. “Yes, thank you.” She stepped across the threshold, quite forgetting that she had precisely zero desire to go inside. 

The door promptly slammed shut behind her. 

The clerk’s muffled voice came from behind it, cackling - “Whoever brought the key, we were instructed to allow in… but not to let out!”

Panic seized her like she had never felt before, dwarfing the panic during her fall only moments ago. She knew about Gringotts; her brother worked here. The vaults were designed to kill intruders. There was no Apparating out, no picking the locks. This was how Gringotts worked. Any fool could break in, but it was a death sentence; nobody could break out. Her heart slammed itself against her ribcage like a trapped bird. She was a creature of the wild Northern moors; she needed the wind, the endless sky, the stars, and here she was, buried miles beneath the earth, in a chamber only a few paces bigger than a broom closet. She felt she would faint. They were going to die here. How long would it take? Would they suffocate before they starved? Would Fig die first, because he was older, weaker? Would she, in her desperation, eat him? 

“Well this is a pickle, isn’t it,” Fig said lightly. He didn’t seem concerned at all. He wasn’t going to starve or suffocate, she realized; she was going to kill him. “Happen to notice any of that odd glow?” he asked. 

The question took her off guard enough that her panic ebbed, and she saw that yes, there was more of that same moonbright glow - the whole back wall was suffused with it. Relief, then fresh dread, washed over her. There was another portal - but God knew where it would take them next. This must be the treasure the vault contained. She rushed forward, made hasty by her claustrophobia, Fig following, and pushed through, and found herself in a vast, cathedral chamber, dominated by a massive statue of a man, leaning forward, bracing himself with hands the size of boats on the ground. He had a long, sweeping beard that pooled on the floor, and beneath his eye was a stone basin, like a font of holy water, or a bird bath. His face was wizened, eyes crinkled, and as Jane looked, she couldn’t quite place her finger on why he looked somehow, subtly off. His eyes were a little too close together, perhaps, a little too large, his brow a little too smooth, little details that seemed incongruous in an otherwise very lifelike depiction of an old man. She stared, dumbfounded at the scale of it all, fear and panic forgotten, and as she watched, a tear, bright as the moon, welled in his eye and fell into the basin. 

“A Pensieve!” Fig said, rushing past her. “Come!” And he plunged his head into the stone bowl, where she knew he could not hear her. Her annoyance with him returned - yet again, he gave her no choice but to follow God knew where. But she had to admit; by now, even she was curious. She at least knew this was reasonably safe; her father had a Pensieve, although it had never worked for her, her head simply clunking against the stone bottom when she tried to enter. She cautiously lowered her face into the moonbright water. 

She fell, tumbling, light as a feather, and landed on her feet next to Fig. They were in the same chamber, but the statue was missing. Two men were waving their wands as columns and flourishes sprouted from the floor like trees. One of the men was the man from the statue, and Jane saw that the likeness had been true: indeed he had an uncanny quality about him, large eyes a bit too close together, a brow a bit too smooth for a man his age, and she saw now that he was small, shorter than she was, his hands like child’s hands, but gnarled and old. There was something childlike about him, despite his wrinkles and beard. The other man had an equal strangeness, though he was tall and plump rather than tiny; his eyes also were large and close set, his hands also short-fingered, a rosy blush in his cheeks incongruous next to his white-streaked beard and bald pate. 

“That should do,” the small man said. “Whoever comes next, they must know, and these memories will tell them.” He waved his wand again and the great statue of himself materialized, pulling itself up out of the floor like a man emerging from the mud. He put the tip of his wand to his temple and withdrew a shining memory, dripping, a substance more liquid than spider’s silk, more airy than a long strand of spittle, more solid than a wisp of smoke, the same moonbright glow as the key, the portals, her own barn owl patronus beneath the new moon at the top of the Caer. With a gesture it flew up and sank into the statue’s eye. 

The plump man nodded. “If they don’t know where the power comes from,” he said, “it may well destroy them.” 

“What power?” Jane asked, to Fig and to herself, but before Fig could give her more than a puzzled look she felt a hand on the back of her neck that yanked her bodily out of the memory. She landed in a heap on the marble floor, tensed and ready to fight or flee, and what she saw stopped her heart cold. 

A goblin stood before her, but he was not like the withered and spectacled clerks she’d seen behind desks at Gringotts, not like the amiable but strange colleagues Matthias had occasionally brought for dinner. He had a wicked, sharp face, and he wore a pauldron of goblin silver. It covered his whole arm, ending in a taloned silver gauntlet, and it was etched with red runes that shimmered like blood boiling. His black eyes were fixed upon her in a terrible stare. 

“What did the memory say,” he barked. He reached out, and even from a dozen feet away she felt his cold metal fingers grip her neck. He lifted her, slowly, from the floor, until her feet were kicking beneath her. She scrabbled to release his hand but nothing was there but his cruel magic, that felt like hot breath on her throat. Panic rose in her like gorge. 

A jet of purple light flew from Fig and splashed against the goblin, who took no notice. She heard a terrible smack and a crash and knew that Fig had been thrown back against the wall. She wondered if he was dead. Lights blinked in the corners of her eyes, and spots of darkness. 

“The memory,” the goblin repeated, his voice a low hiss. “It’s gone now. What did it say.”

Her mind grew slow, and she felt a strange calm, like when she had leapt from the top of the Caer. She was going to die here. She had faced death twice already today, and the third time would be the charm. She was so sad, that she had never seen Hogwarts. She had never mastered her magic, never become herself. She would die for something that had absolutely nothing to do with her. A tear slid down her face, and out of the corner of her eye she saw it fly off her cheek like a shooting star, and sink into the great statue’s heart. 

With a groan and a sound like roots torn from the earth the gargantuan statue ripped its hand from the floor, and then faster than anything that size should be able to move it swatted the goblin like a fly. He flew across the room and landed with a clatter on the marble floor as Jane fell in a heap, gasping, but already he was up and moving, surrounded by a sick red glow of protective magic, murder in his eyes. 

She ran. She didn’t know what else to do. She ran towards where she thought Fig had fallen, and found him rousing himself, blood trickling down his temple. She saw, behind him, a moonlight glow. Snatching his hand she yanked him forward and threw herself into it. There was a terrible roar, and a crash, and a sound like a huge door slammed shut, and then quiet. Her lungs shuddered to pull in breath. They were in the dark, and she felt wind on her face. 

“If you’ll just,” Fig said, prying at her fingers clamped around his hand, “let me go. You’ve got a very strong grip, you know.” With surprising effort she released him.

She looked up. Trees stretched into the sky all around her, and merciful God, above them, the stars. She felt she would weep. 

“Well that was certainly an adventure,” Fig said lightly. “That was Ranrok, wasn’t it? I’ve seen him on the front page of the Daily Prophet.” He took a swig from a wiggenweld he pulled from inside his jacket, and the cut on his temple sealed over. “He’s the head of the goblin Loyalists, isn’t he? The ones talking about a country just for goblins? He’s killed dozens of wizards, hasn’t he.” He shrugged, grinning. “Good thing we got away.”  She was going to Azkaban, she realized, giddy, because she was going to kill a teacher before she ever got to school. 

“Ah!” he said, before she could rally her senses beyond formless fury. “We’re here!” He gestured with his wand to the sign that rose before them in the dark, and a wisp of light illuminated it. <-HOGSMEADE, it said, and on the other side, HOGWARTS ->. She had arrived.

Fig rushed her down the forest path and to the Great Hall as her adrenaline rush settled into a fierce headache. He conjured a blank set of robes for her before shoving her through the door and vanishing - she never quite forgave him for that, the cowardice he would claim as a wish to not tarnish her further by association. He had dragged her into the jaws of death with his extracurricular activities - the carriage had clearly been attacked because of him, because his silly friend George had brought that strange key, he had pulled her along and given her no real chance to say no, thank you very much but could we please just Apparate to Hogwarts, into immense danger, into breaking into Gringotts, into a battle with a goblin - not just any goblin but Ranrok, who knew her face now and would not forget it - and now he abandoned her in her moment of need with a sharp push on the back. She stumbled into a Hall in full feast, late, in every possible way, sweaty, dirty, bloody, and alone, a boy in a dress, and to a chorus of vicious snickers she walked down the aisle with her head held high like a bride.

“What’s this?” Professor Black, the headmaster, said when he saw her, a fussy, sleek man with a stupid face. “You’re the late admittance? Where is Fig? What are you doing in a dress, boy?”

“Yes,” she’d replied, a mumble despite the anger squirming in her core. “I’m the new student. Jane Thorn.”

“Jane?” he’d said, incredulous. “Oh. You’re a Thorn.” His voice was instantly utterly bored. “Weasley! What’s his name?” A stout redhaired witch appeared with a list. “We have him listed as Jacob, Professor,” she said warily. “But there may have been a mistake…”

“No mistake but his,” Black said. “He’s a Thorn. Every now and again one of them’s a bit off. But you’re a boy. Your name is Jacob.” He leaned towards Jane and spoke as if she were deaf, or dim. “Boys wear boy clothes here, no matter what they let you get up to at home. Eccentric, the Thorns,” he said to the woman called Weasley. “They get up to all sorts in that tower of theirs. There’s a mad one in every generation. I knew his aunt when I was a student, Alina, wasn’t it. She was mad even then.” He waved his wand and Jane’s dress vanished. She froze, gaping there in her knickers, laughter wicked and delighted rising like crows from the crowd, and Black spluttered an instant before regaining his composure. She understood in a flash. He’d meant to Transfigure her clothes, but had only Vanished them. He was incompetent as well as cruel.

“Weasley! Conjure the boy a uniform and get him Sorted, I’m off to bed. He kept us waiting long enough.” He marched off and the redheaded witch quickly conjured a grey jumper and pants onto Jane before hustling her down onto a stool.

“I’m terribly sorry, dear,” she whispered when she leaned close to put on the Hat. “Let’s just get you Sorted and then I think there’s still time for pudding.” She plopped the Hat onto Jane’s head.

And there it was, time paying no heed to the tumble of her heart. This was the moment, the very moment that she had not realized she had dreaded. The fate of her next three years, and frankly her life, decided in one long instant. Of course every Thorn was a Ravenclaw - excepting her mother, a Fawley and a Gryffindor - there was never any question of it. Thorns were archetypal Ravenclaws: intelligent, aloof, prone to eccentricities that at times veered into madness. She thought of her father, placidly swimming through the Ministry, friends with everyone and close to none, respected, listened to, but never truly understood, least of all by himself. She thought of her sister, cleverly feeling her way through her father’s footsteps, likable, charming, as emotionally intelligent as her father was rational, who loved easily and swiftly but for whom love was a burden, something that sapped rather than filled her, something she resented and fought and needed. She thought of her brother, tenacious as a pit bull when faced with the trickiest curse, a simple creature who loved a good puzzle and a stiff drink and a good woman and perhaps, one day, a child or three, whose eyes glazed with mute terror when faced with talk of heartbreak or death and who quickly changed the subject. She thought of her aunt Alina. She thought of Black - there’s a mad one in every generation.

The knot of anger in her core, laid by Fig’s blithe leap into death, brooded by her bridal chorus of jeers and Black’s idiot cruelty, broke open, an egg, and a serpent of fire uncurled. Rage filled her. She would not be like them, who had exiled her, who othered her despite their best intentions, who did not truly believe her, who worried and bothered themselves over her because she was a problem to be solved, not a person to be trusted with her own fate. She would not be what everyone expected. She would not be clever and creative and cold and crazy. She would feel. She would become. She would show everyone.

“If that’s how you want to begin,” the Hat whispered in her ear, in a voice like old cloth, “better be Slytherin.”

She heard the Hat call out her house the moment she heard it in her ear, and Professor Weasley scooped the Hat off her head and she was thrust back into the world, a second rebirth. She was taken aback. She had not expected this - she had expected, she realized, to be overruled, placed in Ravenclaw despite her protests, to maybe, maybe be given the grace of Gryffindor, or perhaps given the humiliation of Hufflepuff, which would have made a sort of poetic sense. She’d been humiliated in every other way on her path to Hogwarts, and so the Dunce’s House would have felt appropriate. But of Slytherin, she was frankly frightened. Her family only ever mentioned the house as if it were an explanation; talk of murderers and malingering followed by, “a Slytherin, of course,” and then the “ah” of a puzzle solved.

She approached the Slytherin table with trepidation, to light applause and muffled giggles, and snatched a bowl of rice pudding and a chicken leg and began to eat, staring at her plate. She kept her eyes down and ate like it was her job, glancing up only briefly to take in her housemates. Most of them were engaged in their own cliques, eyeing her in passing, curious and malicious, but one dark-haired girl was resolutely staring at her. Jane avoided her gaze but accidentally caught her eye on one of her furtive glances, and the girl broke into a wide smile, fluffing her hair and batting her lashes, and - horrors - got up and came around the table to squeeze into a space on the bench next to Jane.

“Nerida Roberts,” she said confidently. “Welcome to Hogwarts.” Her voice had a cloying, babydoll affectation about it. She leaned into Jane’s side, pressing her breasts against Jane’s arm. “Really glad to meet you. You’re very cute, you know. I’m sure we’ll be great friends.”

“Thanks,” Jane mumbled, cringing away.

“You’re welcome,” Nerida giggled. “You’re a Thorn, right? Eirenn Thorn is your sister, right?” She curled her hair around a finger. “My father works with her at the Ministry.” She squeezed her arms together and her breasts bulged around them. “It’s like we’re already family!” She giggled.

“Mm,” Jane said, concentrating on stuffing her mouth full of food while she inched away from Nerida on the bench. She’d only gotten through half the pudding and was reaching for a second drumstick when the food Vanished before her, and she felt an echo of rage at Fig for dragging her on his wild adventure and making her late. She knew she wouldn’t get anything more to eat until breakfast. She followed the other Slytherins down to the dungeons, Nerida still attempting conversation and Jane dully providing one-word replies, deep and deeper down an endless spiral stair to an echoing, green-lit cave, fireplaces and armchairs scattered about, massive windows at the far end with sleek black fish darting beyond them. Professor Ronen was there, head of Slytherin House, an amiable man like a bear in a fez, and he led her to her dormitory, another cave-like chamber with a green glass dome for a ceiling, admitting weak moonlight filtered through black water. As Fig predicted, the boy’s dormitory. “You’re in luck,” he said. “Percival Selwyn transferred to Durmstrang, so we have a spare bed.” He gestured magnanimously between her and the three boys already there. “Jacob Thorn, everyone. Jacob, meet Sebastian Sallow,” - a dark-haired boy with a guarded look - “George Pinch-Smedley,” - a smirking fat boy - “and Alaric Avery.” - a pale boy with lank, colourless hair who never met her eyes.

“Professor,” she said, “I’m Jane. Not Jacob. I think I should be with the girls.”

Ronen shifted and smiled and looked uncomfortable. “Ha ha,” he joked. “Don’t we all!” He faltered under Jane’s stare. “Yes, Fig did send a message after you were Sorted. Well.” He smiled appeasingly. “I’d have to check with the headmaster.” That was as good as a flat no, Jane knew. “For now this will have to do.” He hustled away. There was a set of fresh pajamas on her bed, and a few toiletries by the wash basin. The other boys milled around getting ready for bed; they were old friends and knew each other well. Sebastian stole glances at her, while George and Avery ignored her, which she was more than happy for them to do. There were a few whispers that would have alarmed her if she had been less exhausted, but she could do nothing but change into her pajamas, wash her face, and climb into bed, sheets toasty from a heating brick left by an elf. She would continue the fight tomorrow, but for now, she would sleep. The moment her head touched the pillow she fell into dreamless dark.

She was awoken an instant later by her bedsheets ripped off. Avery held her down as George stripped her pajama pants off her. He thinks he’s a girl, lads! he sang. Let’s give him girl parts! Sebastian was shouting for them to stop and already had his wand out, but not before George brandished his own. She watched, time once again strangely slowed, as he pointed his wand at her penis, the word diffindo forming on his lips.

~

The pen hitched and a slash marred her handwriting, a jagged line opening across the inside of her wrist. It gushed a brief glut of blood before closing. She crossed that line out. Umbridge wouldn’t count it.

~

She’d spent the night in the hospital wing. Sebastian had Stunned Avery and Expulsed George, then rushed her to the faculty tower, her parts in her hands. Nurse Blainey had reattached them with a pass of her wand and a blush, but not before pausing, an odd look on her face, to ask Jane if she was sure she wanted them back. “It’s just,” she said awkwardly. “I saw the dress, at the feast. And you called yourself Jane. Are you… sure? You want it back on?”

Yes, Jane had said, she wanted it back on, stunned. Nothing about her parts felt wrong to her, un-girl-like. It simply felt like part of her. She knew girls were different down there. And she knew what those parts were for, the Thorns were all very matter-of-fact about that. She knew that boys made her blush in the way girls usually blushed for boys. It was part of why she felt so wrong in the boy’s dorm - it felt indecent to be around them, like a voyeur, as she had watched them change into their pajamas out of the corner of her eyes. Now that she thought on it, she had felt wrong to be among the boys at St Peters, although she thought it was merely because they were all Muggles. But now she realized - it sullied her heart to look at the boys with what she knew was lust, when they felt so at ease. It felt wrong. She felt nothing for girls, and knew there would be no leering among them (although Nerida Roberts popped into her mind, and with disquiet she realized she might be the object of leering herself). It was part of why she felt she should be in the girls’ dorm, although if she were asked honestly she would wish not to be in a dorm at all, but to have her own small room that wasn't assigned on the basis of her genitals. She wished people would simply not think about her penis, could just ignore it and see her girlhood as something mystical, that sat in the soul, the way she did. She knew this was a mad thought, that most would think that a girl could not have a penis, and yet it felt correct, like the Truth. She didn’t know what else to say about it. And so Blainey had whisked it back on, Scourged it clean, and pulled her pajama pants up with an impatient wave. She pushed her into a bed and gave her a Blood Replenishing Potion and a Draught of Dreamless Sleep and left with a pat on her shoulder. “Drink the Draught straight away,” she said as she left. “No good come from dreaming about any of this tonight.”

Jane had woken late in the morning, the sun already high. There was a white cloth screen around her bed, a kindness from Blainey, a bit of privacy after her ordeal. A tiny bell tinkled on her bedside table and she heard footsteps approach, and Blainey came through with a tray: hot tea and plain porridge and steaming tonic in a crystal goblet. “Drink it right away,” Blainey said, “and hurry with your breakfast; you’ve got a visitor and I can’t keep her off much longer.” She gave Jane an odd, sympathetic look and left. Jane ate mechanically, hunger warring with nameless dread, and when only dregs were left, the screen vanished and a woman in rosy robes approached, Conjured a chair, and introduced herself.

“Good morning,” she had said, Jane’s lip curling to remember. “I’m Professor Umbridge. We’ve not yet met.” She had red hair, like Jane’s, but straight where Jane’s was curly, and a foxlike face. “I am Professor of Runes.” She smiled, in a way Jane was sure she thought was kind. “I saw your Sorting last night. Welcome very much to Hogwarts School.” She paused, as if for applause, then her face became pained, sympathetic. “I saw also your clothes when you entered, before they had been corrected. I heard you refer to yourself with a girl's name.” She became very grave. “I spoke to Nurse Blainey, who told me what happened last night. She did not wish to, at first,” - her voice hardened a touch - “but I reminded her how very seriously I take the protection of the female students of Hogwarts School.” She became prim again. “I also spoke to your head of house, Professor Ronen, who informed me that you requested he refer to you by that same girl’s name, and to be placed in the girls’ dormitory.”

“Yes,” Jane replied, dull. A part of her had expected something like this, that someone would come to correct her problem, but she didn’t think it would happen so soon, so bluntly. It felt unreal, fake. A ringing grew in her ears.

Umbridge’s head cocked. “I’m not sure if I am quite clear,” she said. “Am I to understand that you believe you are a girl?”

“I am a girl,” Jane said, a mumble. She understood, of course, how mad she sounded. But she also knew it was the Truth. There was deep magic in Truth; the Thorns knew this - the family motto was Vincit Veritas, Truth Conquers. Jane didn’t know how to prove or argue this Truth; she simply knew that to say otherwise would be a Lie, and that magic did not abide Lies. A paradox, for magic was a lie, an impossibility that became true.

Umbridge’s brow furrowed. “You are not a girl,” she said. “As clearly evidenced by what was reattached to you last night. I have spoken to Professor Black,” - she became brisk - “and he informs me that it is not uncommon in your family for some members to exhibit certain… eccentricities. We here at Hogwarts do our best to be tolerant of… “ she smiled. “Differing perspectives. This is a school for magic, after all!” Her eyes brightened, dewy. “The power of imagination is infinite, and creativity is to be encouraged. But. There are limits.” She darkened. “I have made it my mission at this school to ensure that its female students are protected. And when a male attempts to sleep in the girl’s dormitory, to view them in states of undress and be present when they sleep, I must intervene.”

The ringing was deafening in Jane’s ears. It seemed like Umbridge was talking from a great distance. “I don’t see the girls that way,” she said, her voice faint to her own ear, muffled. She felt like she was watching herself from ten feet away.

“Oh,” Umbridge replied, surprised. “Well. And I take it you do see the boys “that way”?” Her tone was cloying, polite.

Jane had not replied. A fire had slid through her, and she had felt herself blush.

“I see,” Umbridge said briskly. “Of course sexual contact between any two students is grounds for expulsion from Hogwarts, although the headmaster does retain discretion on such matters.” She cleared her throat and looked aside. “I am sure seduction of one's sleepmates and sodomy would not be given as much grace as a kiss under the mistletoe at the Yule Ball. Nevertheless.” She paused stiffy.

Clarifying anger reared in Jane's heart, her serpent of flame, slamming her back into her body. “I would not,” she snapped. “I am a Lady.”

Umbridge’s brows rose gently. “That is a very impertinent tone, Mr Thorn, “she said coolly. “Students are to address teachers at Hogwarts with respect. But all the same. You would not be the first boy with such inclinations here, if it is even true, and I have no reason to believe it is. It may be that you are lying merely for the chance to get closer to the girls, odd as it may seem that you would risk the shame of tribadism for the chance to peep at best, but men’s perversions have led them down stranger paths. If you truly had such inclinations you would wish to remain in the boy’s dormitory, to better access them, would you not? It does not matter. You have a phallus. And you clearly intend to keep it, as Nurse Blainey told me.”

“I told you, I do not wish to access the boys,” Jane had said sharply. “I no more wish to view the boys in undress than I wish to be viewed by them. But you didn’t think about my modesty, did you? And what does my phallus matter, anyway?”

“Impertinence again,” Umbridge said, surprised, but still silky. “As if a boy need be modest before another boy. Once more and you shall earn yourself a detention. It matters a great deal. It is the tool by which males violate women and girls. I will tell you bluntly that had you left it on the dormitory floor I would be more comfortable with allowing you to sleep with the girls, although you would not truly be one yourself. But regardless of what you intend to do with it, sodomy or otherwise, so long as you keep it we must assume that you are capable of using it in violence. It is certainly true that not all men are rapists; only some. Not all men stand by and do nothing as women are assaulted; only most. It may be that you are, quote unquote, ‘one of the good ones,’ although your eccentricity displays a disconnect with reality that is troubling in and of itself. But we cannot know that. We must assume the worst, until you prove otherwise.”

“And when will that be?” Jane snapped. “When I’m dead?”

“Detention,” Umbridge replied smoothly, with the grace of a checkmate. “This Saturn’s day, the day to correct mistakes. You will come to my home in Aranshire, across the lake. Directions will be sent to you by owl.” She smiled, and something in it stopped Jane’s rage cold. “I will tell you why I care so deeply.” There was a kind of cool sympathy in her voice, that Jane did not realize for days was, in fact, pity.

Umbridge had left after that, conjuring the white screen back into place with a strange air, something a little too sad to be called smug. Jane looked up at Umbridge in her armchair and shivered. Their first meeting had gone badly. The ones that followed only got worse. She wrote another line. The woman is the producer of the large gamete.

~

She barely remembered her first classes, something she regretted keenly. She had been looking forward to them, yearning for them, her whole life. They were nothing she didn’t already know, of course - Levitation charms in Defense Against the Dark Arts, with Professor Hecat, an old friend of her mother’s, eyeing her shrewdly but otherwise treating her fair, and Summoning charms with Ronen, one of the first charms she’d mastered back in her tower room at the Caer. Ronen paired the class up boy-girl, and put her with a transfer student from Ouagadou named Natsai. There had been anger and humiliation at being paired with a girl - not to mention the fact that the clothes laid out for her in the hospital wing had been a boy’s uniform, with no chance for her to argue or change them - but also a sort of steely resolve, that had settled into her like ice. She had the measure of Hogwarts now. She knew what to expect, that she would be considered mad, ignored at best, punished at worst. Ronen’s amiable droning about proper wand movements (nonsense, Summoning an object required nothing more than force of will and desire) washed over her as an alchemy of emotions roiled within. Bitterness and anger, yes, but also a keening grief, at a dream long-held with a cruel twist revealed, a despair, that she would not have the strength to survive it. The very thing that allowed her to come to Hogwarts made it her hell. She recalled staring at a tapestry on the wall behind Ronen, a unicorn with a crown around its neck like a collar, chained. As she silently seethed and wept, her heart expanding with fire and then crushed like a lost breath, the unicorn became her. The crown was her Hogwarts letter: her ticket to the magical world, her birthright and her due, but it was also her collar. If she didn’t play by Hogwarts’s rules, if she fought too hard or made too much noise, she could be expelled, her wand snapped in half, banned from practicing magic legitimately, arrested and sent to Azkaban for unlicensed sorcery - because she knew, nothing would ever truly stop her. But if she played by the rules, if she hid and silenced herself to survive, she couldn’t do magic; she must live as Jane, fight for her womanhood, or she would be nothing more than a Squib, and would be expelled anyway. The very thing that made her magical - her horse’s horn, her girl’s penis, her transgression, her transition, her in-between-ness - was also the thing that made her dangerous, untameable, that necessitated the yoke. Tiny fires raced along her fingertips when she shook with rage, and when she smashed her anger down to prevent trouble and a second detention her heart sank into despair so profound she couldn’t Summon the book she was meant to. So much power she had, and yet she looked an utter fool.

But Natsai - Natty, she learned - was a surprising comfort. She too was an outsider. She made no pretense that she understood or accepted Jane’s girlhood when Jane explained, but she wasn’t shocked or unkind. She looked at Jane with the genuine curiosity of someone from far, far away, gazing at anybody on the street. Jane was no more unusual to Natty than any other Hogwarts student, and that small spit of peace was a rock in a thrashing sea.

Professor Weasley had summoned her after her classes to inform her she needed to make a trip into Hogsmeade, for supplies - and finally, a beacon amidst her mad despair, to buy her own wand - and told her that she should ask a fellow student to guide her. She’d suggested Sebastian, perhaps hearing from Blainey that it was him who brought her to the hospital wing, and Jane had agreed without much thought. He had defended her, at least, and in her moments of terror, holding her severed penis in her bloody hands, his look of utter blanched horror had been something to cling to, like Natty in Charms class. That he had cared at all, that he rushed to help, had been the only thing that kept her from passing out. She hadn’t shared more than twenty words with him, had no idea what he thought of her, but he had helped her. For that she picked him. It was all she had to go on.

To her great surprise he instantly treated her like a girl, even in the ways she did not want. He blushed and shifted awkwardly when he met her in the Clock Tower, offered to carry her bag and struggled to meet her eye, and made the most painful kind of small talk until they were well on the path to Hogsmeade. Finally after a long silence, both of them staring ahead as they trudged, he had spoken more directly.

“Ronen’s a fool for putting you with us,” he said abruptly. Jane looked at him, surprised, and he caught her eye and blushed and looked away. “Putting a girl in the boy’s dormitory. He’s mad. It’s his fault that.. that happened.” His blush deepened. “It’s my fault too. I should have stopped George faster. He’s always been a prat. But I didn’t think he’d..” He trailed off. “I’m just sorry.”

Jane hadn’t known what to say. “I don’t know what I’d’ve done,” she mumbled, “if you hadn’t been there.” She shook her hair in front of her face. She’d glanced at him, caught him glancing at her, and they’d both looked away, both blushing now. They didn’t speak again until they came to the gate of Hogsmeade.

“I’ve got some, er, errands to run,” he said shiftily. “That’s Tomes and Scrolls there” - he pointed at a shop on the corner - “and Ollivander’s is just down that road, and Pippin’s Potions is behind it, and Gladrags is up Main Street a ways. I saw what Black did to your dress” - he shuffled his feet in awkward anger - “so I imagine you want to get new clothes. Will you be alright? I’ll meet you in the town square when you’re done.” She nodded and he ran off and then she was finally, blissfully alone. Nobody on the street here knew her from Adam. They may just see a boy, but she was used to that. At least they didn’t see her as a boy who thought he was a girl, like at Hogwarts. Not yet, at least.

She decided to save the best for last, so she ran her duller errands first, re-buying all the books and seeds and potioneering tools she’d lost when the carriage had been destroyed, something that still didn’t feel quite real. She couldn’t face the task of buying a dress for herself, but she knew she needed something other than the single boy’s uniform she had on her back, so she bought a few plain grey jumpers and pairs of trousers at Gladrags as quickly as she could. Girls wore pants sometimes, she told herself, and she could only fight so many battles in a day. Finally, with a sigh, she headed to Ollivander’s.

This was something she had dreamed of her entire life: to have her own wand. Not just a wand that she could use - like the ratty old blackthorn thing up her sleeve that Fig had given her only yesterday, which felt like a rented pair of shoes - but her very own, something that she chose, that chose her. Her family’s wands were so much a part of them that touching them felt indecent; she remembered the furtive shame she felt nicking her father’s in the night to practice, or attempt, to cast spells. Her father’s wand: silvery birch, whippy, eleven and a quarter inches, a core of unicorn hair, a gentle swirl carved along its length and at the end, a merlin’s head with its little curved beak made to rest along the pinky finger. Her mother’s: stout holly, unyielding, twelve and three quarters, phoenix feather, plain with a knobbly, natural handle. Her sister’s: brittle rowan, ten inches, dragon heartstring, a delicate patterning of leaves along its wavy length. Her brother’s: pliable apple, nine and three quarters inches, phoenix feather, straight and simple with a square head at the end like a nail. Her aunt Alina’s, which Jane remembered her father snapping in half, tears on his face, and dropping onto her casket before a handful of dirt: swishy dogwood, thirteen inches, unicorn hair, a jaunty spiral with the handle carved into a feather.

She braced herself before the door, knowing that she would have to introduce herself as Jane, that she couldn’t get away with the mask of calling herself Jacob if she wanted the wand to work. She knew this was one of the most magical moments of a wizarding life; she could not enter it with a lie on her lips. But she was so, so tired. Every moment that she had attempted to show herself since she had come to Hogwarts she had been struck down. She wanted so badly to hide, to lie, to make it easier. She did not want to have to explain, to state her case. Not even a day had passed at Hogwarts and she wanted, more than anything, to give up. She did not yet know if she would have the strength to say her name, but she pushed open the door anyway; she did not know what else to do.

The shop was empty, but a silver bell tinkled as she approached the counter, and Mr Ollivander came around the corner. He was beyond ancient. He looked like a dandelion in October; dry and bent with the weight of his head, wisps of white hair around his ears and a massive mustache on his face. But his eyes were huge, luminous, piercing blue, and they were not clouded at all. He looked at her with the strangest expression.

“Jacob Thorn,” he said, softly. “Yes, I know you, I remember your father, and your mother, goodness you look like her, I’d heard you finally got your letter, but” - he cocked his head - “that’s not right. That’s not your name anymore, is it?”

“No,” she said, off-guard. “How did you know?” How fast did word travel in Hogsdale?

“Oh,” he said, dismissive. His voice was like old paper. “You learn these things. So what do I call you, my dear?” He gazed at her, expectantly, curiously, without judgment. She was taken aback, and she thought suddenly of the moonbright patronus at the top of the Caer, that had flown from her mouth like a name. The slender barn owl had wheeled on its sailing wings beneath the dark moon, in flight, yet somehow so still. She had tried many times, but she had not been able to conjure it since.

“Jane,” she whispered. Something sounded in her soul, like a silent bell. Her chest ached. She felt a tear slide down her face. She had not blinked since he had spoken, and he had not broken his gaze.

“Yes,” he said, and she saw a tear to match her own well in his eye like a crystal, and fall to the counter. “That sounds right.” He’d twirled his wand in the air without looking away, and three boxes flew from the shelves behind him and landed on the counter with papery thunks.

“Please,” he said, “pick one.”

She tore her eyes from his to look at the boxes, which were all exactly the same. She had no idea which one to pick. She reached for the box on the right, hesitantly, and as her fingers brushed it, Mr Ollivander flicked his wand and it sailed away back to the shelf.

“No,” he said lightly. “I didn’t think it would be that one. Try again.”

She reached for the one next to her hand, that had been in the middle when there had been three. As soon as her hand moved towards it Mr Ollivander again flicked his wand and sent it flying back to the shelf.

“Not that one either,” he said, sounding satisfied. “Try the last.”

She reached for the last box, the one left, and could not have said what she felt. She saw motes of dust swirling in the sunshine that passed through the window. She heard her own breath. The moment stretched, endless. She had always been here; she would always be here. She was exhausted, and she was at peace. She touched the box.

“Open it,” he said, as softly as a proposal.

She opened it, and before she even saw the wand she knew it was hers. It lay on its tissue paper cradle like the sword in the lake, shining: long, straight, as pale as bone. No carving, no details, no handle but a silver ferrule at one end.

“Take it,” Mr Ollivander said gently. “You know it’s yours.”

She took it, and it settled into her hand like a cat. It was hers. It felt like a limb she hadn’t known was missing. There was a stillness in the shop, a sense of vastness and quiet. She felt moonlight on her face.

“Ash,” he said. “Unyielding. A stubborn wood. And unicorn hair. It won’t take to a new owner if you lose it. Treat it well, or you will break its heart.” He blinked, the first she had seen him do. "And your own." He glanced down at it. “Thirteen inches.”

The same as her aunt Alina’s, Jane thought.

“Do not think it,” Mr Ollivander said immediately, shaking his head. “Everyone thinks it. There are no unlucky numbers. Every number has its own power, and path.” He smiled kindly, sadly. “This is a harder path than most. But you knew that already, I think.”

“H-how much,” she stammered. Her face was wet with tears, and she raised a hand to wipe them, but he stopped her, gently, with his withered, long fingers.

“Do not,” he said simply. “Seven galleons, if you have it. Or nothing, if you do not.” He patted her arm. “I would not keep her from you.”

Jane paused in her writing, and gazed at the wand in the pencil-holder before her on the desk. It was hers, more fully than anything else she owned, but it was a relational hers, not a possessive. It was hers as a friend was hers, as a lover, a connection tenuous and unbreakable at once. Umbridge made her leave it in the pencil-holder because she was paranoid and petty; she feared that a boy in detention would not be able to help himself from a vindictive under-the-table jinx, and she liked the little power play of it all, to un-man Jacob Thorn by disarming him. She looked up to watch Umbridge tap her own wand on the teapot, refilling it, and felt a ripple of revulsion. Hers was an ugly little thing, short, as ornamentally lathed as a stair bannister, a chunky amethyst inset along the length. Umbridge had explained to her once that the phoenix feather at its core represented her triumph over vicious odds, her unrelenting fight against injustice. Jane thought it more likely represented the fact that she was a squawking harpy that refused to change, like all phoenixes, the most stubborn and cold of all creatures, who died in flames regularly just so they could remain exactly the same. She Vanished the sodden linen napkin with a willful glance and Conjured another, then returned to her lines and her memories. The woman is the producer of the large gamete.

After she had paid Ollivander his seven galleons and stepped back out onto the street she felt changed, in some ineffable way. Her weariness was gone. Not everyone would punish her for her truth, there were some who saw clearly, and she was vindicated, gratified. She wasn’t ready to Transfigure her pants into a skirt there on the street - that sort of transfiguration was beyond her skills anyway - and she had no illusions that anything would get easier. The coming detention loomed in her mind, less than a day at school and already a detention, humiliating to someone who had dreamed of being a prefect or even Head Boy all her life. But she felt more armed, more fully arrived. She stuffed the old blackthorn wand from Fig into her bag and slid her true wand up her sleeve. She felt it settle against her skin; cool and smooth as a river stone.

Sebastian seemed in better spirits as well, when she met him in the square. He asked to see her wand and joked that she was a “real witch” now she had it - a witch, she thought, with satisfaction - and suggested they get a butterbeer at the Three Broomsticks to celebrate. There was a strange bravado about him, something nervous but determined, and as they started to walk it dawned on her that he was asking her out. She was just coming to grips with this - he was handsome, in a dark, sly way, but everything else was so much in a roil - when the troll attacked.

In retrospect one of them should have heard it coming. It was a troll, after all. But she had been deep in her thoughts, her face chatting with Sebastian while her mind thrilled and quailed at the thought that he sought her, and Sebastian had been deep in his flirtations, joking and catching her eye whenever he could - afterwards the thought that he’d been so into her as to miss the approach of a troll thrilled her as she fell asleep - and the creature had crashed through the wall right in front of them. It was an ugly thing, three times her height and the weight of an elephant, and it carried a wicked looking club, no mere ripped-up tree trunk but a made thing, of iron laced and thorned in goblin silver, and it wore armor of the same make. It looked directly at her, and she knew in a moment that it meant to kill her.

The jets of red light from Sebastian’s wand glanced off its thick hide as it ran full tilt towards her, the club raised, and she saw its approach like the ground looming, in the same slow motion as when she’d faced death twice before. She froze. She knew no flimsy Shield Charm would save her. A part of her felt a dim satisfaction, a release; yes, this is how she would die. It made sense. She was an abomination, a lie, a madman, and madmen met sticky ends. How many wizards had she read of who took to strange notions, like teaching a troll to dance, and had been smashed flat for their trouble? It made all too much sense. That there was no logical connection between her madness and this method of death did not occur to her. She thought she could teach a troll to dance, a boy to be a girl. The poetry trumped the reason.

But something had changed since her bedsheets had caught fire. She feared death now, rather than welcoming it. And her will to live was so much stronger than her fear of death.

I will live, she thought, with a fierce calm, and her hand drew her wand from her sleeve. She brandished it like a sword, like a unicorn’s horn - or perhaps it brandished itself, she thought, as she felt something beyond and within her move her like a puppet. Her rage and despair and hope and longing alchemized into a cold clarity. She pointed her wand, and imposed her will upon the beast’s club, the simplest matter in the world, and ripped it from its hands as easily as a flower plucked from a vase. A blue flame sang in her mind like a dancer, and she whipped the club around in a great arc and smashed it into the beast’s face. Its enormous momentum brought it crashing, skidding to a stop at her feet. The top of its head was gone, sheared off at the nose. Pale green bogeys the size of slugs glistened amidst blood and brains and bone.

She remembered little of the immediate aftermath; she felt a terrible weakness overcome her, and the world swam before her eyes. She remembered Sebastian catching her arms as she started to fall, and a shocked woman in an official-looking greatcoat exclaiming over the destruction, and then Sebastian was pulling her along and through a pair of great wooden doors into a warmly lit bar. He sat her down on a barstool and there was some hurried conversation with a deep-voiced woman that her brain could not parse, and then a large mug of something warm was thrust in front of her. It smelled tremendous, and she drank in great gulps, and a sweet, salty warmth poured into her and filled her from toes to fingertips. Butterbeer, the best she’d ever had, even better than the stuff her mother brought out for Christmas. She drained the mug and a second was slid before her.

“Take the second one more slowly,” the deep-voiced woman said.

Her faculties were returning to her, and she looked up at the woman, swimming into focus. Her weariness was once again wiped away by shock, for the woman was a man.

“You’re..!” Jane stammered.

“I am,” the woman answered, with annoyance. “And so are you, despite your clothes. But I also have a name, and it’s not Trannah McClock.” She smiled, kindly despite herself. “Sirona Ryan, at your service. Proprietor of the Three Broomsticks, where you currently sit, so behave yourself. And might I have the pleasure of your name in return?”

“Jane,” Jane replied. “Thorn. I’m sorry, I..” She took a sip of the butterbeer. It was so, so good, hot and salty and sweet and crisp. “I didn’t mean to offend. Thank you for the beer.”

Sirona shrugged. “It’s alright. I forgive easily.” She eyed Jane keenly. “Sebastian here tells me you just killed a troll.”

“I.. I suppose I did,” Jane admitted, to herself as much as to Sirona. She took another sip of the beer and felt warmer, calmer, fuller. She looked more closely at the tall woman before her. She wasn’t really a man, Jane saw now. She was as tall and broad as a man, yes, and there was a mannish cast about her face, but her skin was as soft as a woman’s, and there were breasts under the white shirt and barkeep’s vest she wore. The troll was a thousand years ago; she could think of nothing else but how? How had Sirona done it?

“However a troll got through the protections round the village,” Sirona said. “It can’t be good. Either we need to recast the barriers or someone brought it in.”

“It had a club made out of goblin silver,” Sebastian said. “And armor, too”.

“Did it,” Sirona said darkly, sounding not at all surprised. “Well. I imagine Officer Singer will be in to talk to the two of you soon enough, I’m sure,” Sirona said. “Although I’m not sure how much help she’ll be.” She sighed, looking at the goggled expression on Jane’s face. “But I suspect you have a question for me first.”

“How??” Jane burst out.

“How indeed,” drawled a voice from the doorway.

In the sunshine of the open door stood two men. The one who spoke was tall and handsome, with a square jaw and cruel eyes. The other man stood behind him like a shadow; he was bald and thickly built, with the sleeves of his shirt pushed up his forearms. The handsome man strolled forward, doffing his top hat. “How ever did a student - a new one, even, a late one, one who might even yet prove a Squib after all - kill a troll?” He smiled, and Jane felt ill. “One might question whether he had some kind of advantage. A secret. A weapon, even. A question many would like answered.”

“Why do you ask,” Sirona snapped, coming out from behind the bar. “Would you have preferred the troll killed her, Rookwood?”

“Her?” The man laughed. “Found another loon like yourself, have you, Simeon?” Sirona flinched, and Jane felt her serpent of flame uncoil within her, testing the air. “No, no, of course not,” he continued. “Merely curious, is all.” His companion hulked silent behind him, malice glinting in his gaze.

“You sent it, didn’t you,” Sebastian said suddenly. He was shaking with anger. “It had goblin armor, the troll. I know the goblins are in Rookwood Castle. I know you let them set up there. Why’d you do it? What’s she to you? Everyone in Feldcroft is afraid of you but I’m not.” His voice broke on his last word.

“You should be,” the man - Rookwood, Jane thought, sealing the name in her mind - replied silkily. “How’s your sister?”

Sebastian drew his wand with a snarl and at once Sirona had drawn her own and conjured a barrier between the parties. “Enough,” she said, her voice a crack of thunder. “Not in my bar. Victor. You will kindly leave the premises. Sebastian. You will stow your wand.”

Rookwood had drawn his own wand, but he lowered it. “Certainly we will leave if you ask, Simeon. But we do have some questions for the boy, if he’ll just come along with us for a while.”

Jane would sooner take a dozen detentions with Umbridge than spend a moment alone with this man. She knew, in a flash, that fate had bound them. She saw a green thread stretch between her chest and his own. She knew it in her bones, cold, as surely as she knew she was a girl: one of them would kill the other. Neither could live while the other survived.

“I think Ms Thorn here has other appointments,” Sirona replied sharply. “I’ll be sending an owl along to the school just now to make sure someone comes to fetch these two and see they get back safely. It’s gotten late.”

“I really do think -” Rookwood began, but Sirona fixed him with an intense stare and raised her wand ever so slightly. Other patrons around the bar had turned to look at the altercation, and a few had let their hands drift to their sleeves or breast pockets. “Fine,” he spat. He fixed Jane with a terrible stare. “Lovely to see you again, Simeon.” He swept from the bar back into the waning sunlight.

“Rich twat,” Sebastian spat. “Evil, vile fuck, sitting up in his castle-”

“Language!” barked Sirona. “None of that in my place of business, you’re a student! How old can you be, fifteen?”

“Sorry,” Sebastian muttered. He glanced at Jane. “Just turned sixteen though,” he mumbled, blushing. Jane paid no mind, she had been caught by the word rich. She wasn’t sure she understood what Sebastian meant. She had never heard a wizard call another rich. Calling someone rich meant that others could be poor. But how could a wizard be poor? She did not know any wizards who were poor. She knew plenty of wizards, everyone in her family was well-connected. But when you could summon what you needed from nothing, how could you be poor? She thought rich and poor were things Muggles were. Sirona dashed off to send a note to the school and she turned to Sebastian.

“What did you mean,” she said. “Rich?”

“Oh,” he replied. “Rookwood? Well he’s the Rookwood heir isn’t he? They have a castle by Feldcroft, it’s where my uncle moved us after my parents..” he trailed off.

Jane flushed, and softened. “Sorry,” she said, awkwardly. “I didn’t mean to..”

“No, no,” Sebastian said quickly. “You didn’t know, and it’s alright, it was a long time ago.” He looked down into his beer. A few beats passed, and Jane gazed into her beer too.

“So,” she said, after a moment. She was still curious, and she was also desperate to talk about anything other than the fact that she had just escaped a targeted murder - twice, she was sure of it, and that her murderer was just outside, waiting for her. She knew that if she let herself think about the malice in Rookwood’s eyes she would fall to pieces, and that she could not allow herself to do. There was too much at stake here. She grasped at conversation like a drowning man to flotsam. “What makes the Rookwoods rich?”

Sebastian looked at her strangely. “Well they’ve got a castle don’t they?” He laughed.

Jane still didn’t understand. “Well, what’s special about that? Wizards can live wherever they want.” She thought of the Maesies, Edouard and Josie and their daughter Pippa, friends of her sister’s, who lived in an earthen mound, a howe, up on Orkney, a home that had been in Edouard’s family for generations. It looked like nothing more than a little hill from the outside, no more than ten feet tall. But inside Maes Howe was a maze of rooms like a cozy badger’s den, lit by skylights and paneled in warm wood and old books. “If it’s space that you need can’t you just cast an Undetectable Extension Charm?”

He laughed again, sharply. “Have you ever cast an Undetectable Extension Charm?” he asked archly. “Bloody hard, I hear, and not something you want to get wrong, could kill you if it breaks while you’re in it, can’t it?” Jane had never considered this. The Caer had all sorts of Undetectable Extension Charms on it, as old as its founding. From the outside it was a tall, narrow rectangle of a tower, no more than ninety meters long and fifteen wide. But the inside was like a cathedral, if a cathedral was also a library; seven stories of balconied galleries around an atrium long as a nave, a shallow gurgling fountain in the middle, the roof a sharp peak of stained glass worked with whirls of birds circling. Each mezzanine was crowded with doors that led to other, vast wings, ballrooms that nobody had used for centuries, laboratories and solariums and rows upon rows of books covering every possible surface, the vast majority of the space totally unused, seen only by house-elves and the kites and tits and kingfishers that inevitably found their way in to build nests.

Jane had herself grown up in the northwest wing, a tight spiral of bedrooms and dens and kitchens that Jane’s mother claimed when she married her father, a space she kept neatly decorated and tidy. But throughout the centuries other Thorns had used other parts of the house, setting up home like campers here or there, wherever their fancy struck. Eirenn had claimed a suite of rooms at the base of the Caer’s southern face, to tend her plants and catch the light, at eighteen, as soon as their mother let her, and Matthias had found a solarium at the top of the east face that he liked at twenty. Alina’s rooms on the fourth floor of the west face had been left unchanged since she died. There had been times when the Caer was more full, when multiple lines and generations of Thorns had shared the Caer together, but the family had long been dwindled, and Jane’s father was the last of the male line - before Matthias, of course, and Jacob himself. Jane thought this - the vast, museum spaces, the generations migrating throughout the tower - was because the Thorns were crazy. It didn’t occur to her that it might be because they were rich. She didn’t know how the students at Hogwarts would respond to this - her privilege, atop her madness. She didn’t respond, pensive, and Sebastian caught on.

“Did you grow up in a castle, or something,” he said with a sideways laugh, half joke and half contempt.

“No,” Jane said too quickly. A beat passed. “It’s a tower.” Another beat. “But it is big. Er. On the inside.” She flushed.

Sebastian laughed, with a new, nervous edge. “Well,” he said. “Not all rich people can be bad, I suppose. Looks like I’ve found one of the good ones.” He laughed again, then cleared his throat. “Bet your family’s old, eh? Bet you’ve got all sorts of old bits and bobs around. Old magic, artifacts, things you could sell in a pinch.” Why would anyone need to sell their family heirlooms, Jane wondered. For what, galleons? Galleons could be got anywhere. She didn’t understand. “Bet you have a house-elf too,” Sebastian continued. “Those only come to old houses.” The Caer had house-elves, yes. But Jane had never seen any of them. She didn’t know their names or even how many there were. If she asked for something, a mess to be cleaned or dinner to be made, it just happened, the mess vanishing, food appearing in a flash. She knew her father must know the house-elves, but they only appeared for the Caer’s current lord or lady, and only when specifically asked. She’d never given them much thought. She thought all wizarding houses had elves. She thought that was just how it was, that elves came to wizards whenever they set up a home, that they were a side-effect of wizarding habitation, like rats in a Muggle city, but more useful. It had never occurred to her that some wizards didn’t have them.

“My grandparents were all Muggles,” Sebastian continued. “‘Cept my mum’s mum, she was a halfbreed.” Jane didn’t know any Muggleborns. She knew Matthias had Muggleborn friends, at Gringotts, but she’d never met them. “We don’t have old land or old books or artifacts. Mum and Dad, they taught at Hogwarts, and my uncle Solomon, he was an Auror before..” He trailed off again, then cleared his throat. “So we had enough to have our own place, but owning land isn’t cheap. And there’s plenty of magic you can’t do on a place if you don’t own it or rent it properly. And all the land’s owned, by the Queen if no one else, so you can’t just set up somewhere. It’s got to be proper. And neither of my parents or Solomon would trust themselves to do an Undetectable Extension Charm, or had the galleons to hire someone. Expensive that kind of skill. Looks like you’ll have it though,” he said suddenly, an odd tone in his voice. “The way you killed that troll. You’ve got some gas in you. And you just started too.” He looked down into his mug. “I certainly wasn’t much help.” He lapsed into silence.

“Sebastian, I-” But she was cut short, as Professor Weasley burst through the door, Professor Ronen in tow, and in a moment they were on their way back to the castle. She was briefly debriefed by Weasley, who seemed concerned - but not alarmed, Jane noted with dismay - that she had been attacked by a troll, and impressed - but not surprised, Jane noted with pride - that she had killed it by herself. No safeguards were put in place. Jane was not banned from leaving the grounds for her own safety. Weasley simply offered that it might be wise to not venture far, considering the circumstances. Never once did Weasley call her Jacob, but neither did she call her Jane. She had an easy, motherly air about her, but there was something else, like she was reserving judgment, waiting to see what would become of her. Jane was sent back to Slytherin house with yet another strange feeling in a tumult of a day: she wasn’t sure whether she liked Weasley.

Ronen was waiting for her, and explained with his customary chuckling discomfort that given events of the night previous - and, he admitted, at the strong urging of Sebastian Sallow - George and Alaric would be swapped with two boys from the other fifth-year boy’s room, Duncan Malfoy and Nestor Longbottom, who had already moved in. Ronen was so very sorry that such a terrible tragedy had befallen her on her first night. He hoped there would be no more nastiness and urged her to make friends. Like Weasley he avoided calling her anything at all, not a name, not a pronoun, just you. He left her to her devices before she could gather her thoughts to say anything at all.

In her dorm room she found Duncan and Nestor, unpacking and laying out their pajamas, with Sebastian nervously hovering, glowering. Duncan was an athletic, handsome boy, short and thick, with tousled white-blond hair, and Nestor had a nebbish look about him, tall and hunched with dark hair falling in his eyes.

“Welcome to Hogwarts, Thorn,” Duncan said when she came in, striding over and clapping Jane on the back. “Duncan Malfoy. Terrible business with George, he’s never known when to draw the line. Absolutely out of order. I just want you to know that I’ve got your back. George has had a good talking to by Ronen and all the lads, he knows he was out of order, won’t do anything like it again.” He kept his muscled hand on the back of Jane’s neck, rubbing it. She felt extraordinarily uneasy; he was attractive, and his touch felt suggestive, sexual even. And yet, she could tell, that to Duncan Malfoy, she was just another boy. She felt like something slimy had been dripped down the back of her shirt. “Give us the word, Thorn,” he said with a final clap on her back before releasing her. “And we’ll get him in line. By the way my dad knows your brother, works with him at Gringotts. Dad says he’s a real lad. Happy to make your acquaintance.”

Nestor just eyed her guilelessly, while slowly breaking off pieces of a Honeyduke’s chocolate bar and bringing them glacially to his mouth, slothlike. “You’re a Thorn. You live in Caer Kilton,” he said after Duncan had finished his speech. “I’ve read about it. My grandfather knows your dad,” he added. He kept eating.

“Oh,” Jane said lamely. “My dad knows alot of people.” And plenty of them had come by the Caer, mostly for tete-a-tetes with her father but sometimes for the small, tidy parties her mother would permit. She hid in her rooms, only coming out when dragged forth to meet some important personage - who would want their Squibbery paraded in front of the wizarding world? Not Jane. She waited for Nestor to say more, to introduce himself perhaps, but he just continued his gormless stare.

“That’s Nestor,” Duncan called, stripping off his shirt. Jane looked over and saw his bare skin and corded muscles and jerked her gaze away like she’d seen a crime, flushing. Behind her back she heard Sebastian’s indignant hiss and urgent whisper - I told you - and then Duncan called back to her.

“Listen Thorn,” he said, sounding annoyed but magnanimously patient, “We’re going to go wash up. We’ll-” he trailed off, grasping for words. “Give you a minute. Come on Nestor, get your pajamas.” She heard the boys troupe out, Duncan muttering and Sebastian hissing in the corridor - none of the rest of us get privacy when we change, Duncan’s low scoff, and Sebastian’s retort, she’s a girl, they’re mad to put her with us. She felt uneasy. Duncan had done everything he could to avoid saying her name, avoid asking it, to avoid any mention of her affliction. She understood. He would not punish her, as George had, as Black and Umbridge had. He would ignore her, like Weasley did, like Ronen had. But she felt her heart lift - she’s a girl. Sebastian saw her, and he was fighting for her. She blushed again, and she felt an unsettling, frightening hope. What if it all worked out? What if she could be happy, despite everything?

She set down her bag full of Gladrag’s boy clothes, her disguise, like a Scotsman’s plaid among the heather. She sighed, and plopped into the plush green armchair by her bed. She kicked off her shoes. She was going to do something very kind for Sebastian, very soon. What, she didn’t know. But he deserved the world, for giving her this: a moment alone. She saw the crisp blue striped pajamas on the bed and stripped off her jumper, then unbuttoned her pants and pushed them down, sliding them off her legs one at a time like snake skins. She felt better already, with them gone. She thought about Sirona, wondering at her smooth, soft skin, her beardless face, her breasts. She was determined to find out how she had done it; she would go back to the Three Broomsticks as soon as she could.

She was unbuttoning her shirt when movement caught her eye, a shimmer in a shadow by the fireplace. She peered into the corner and saw nothing, at first, but then, there it was: a disturbance, the barest outline of a shadow around the shape of.. a man. She froze, terrified. Rookwood, or someone he paid, had found her, already, had infiltrated Hogwarts through secret passages he likely learned during his own days at school. No precautions had been made because the teachers knew it was pointless, that she would be found, their problem student disposed of neatly. Students died every year at Hogwarts, usually by accident or their own stupidity - but would it be so unusual for one to be murdered? Her hand moved to her half-buttoned sleeve on its own, whipped her wand forth faster than a blink, and a terrible beat passed, where she asked herself, time again made slow as honey by imminent death - did she really want to know?

“Revelio,” she said, and the Disillusionment charm’s chameleon cover was whipped away. Nerida Roberts stood there, sheepish.

Nerida grinned a half smile, a parody of bashful. “Sorry,” she said. “I just wanted to see,” She twirled her hair, coquetteish. “See what it looks like, you know. After Nurse Blainey put it back on.” She smiled, perverse, and Jane felt ill. “You know I could show you what real girl parts look like.”

~

Jane put down the pen. Her wrist throbbed, and lay in a puddle of blood. She seemed almost to wear a strange bracelet, of garnet and white jade; her flesh bruised and swollen taut, stitched with letters in livid white scar, that wept tiny ruby pearls. The woman is the producer of the large gamete. She had reached the end of the pages allocated for the day. Umbridge heard the tink of the pen against the desk and looked up, rising.

At the start of each detention, Jane was set a number of pages to fill - each page, a hundred lines. And at the end of each detention, Umbridge crossed out lines. She would cross out any lines that she felt were illegible or unclear, and while she was strict about Jane’s handwriting, she would occasionally allow mistakes that - she told Jane expressly - she would not tolerate in a girl. “Boys can never write quite as neatly,” she said, with a sigh. “No sense in pushing you.” Any lines that she crossed out, Jane would have to do again. During her second detention, when her writing hand shook from pain and despair and the enormity of this every week for the next two years, she had been made to re-write fully half of her lines. By November, Jane had started crossing out lines herself that she knew Umbridge wouldn’t count - a small power play, a reclamation, to say, see, I know where you find me flawed before you do.

This week, she had only crossed out one. Her handwriting had vastly improved from the scrawl they allowed at St Peters, as had her ability to shut out the pain. The pain was even becoming something she strangely looked forward to, a meditative ritual. She felt magic working on her; something she didn’t understand and couldn’t parse, some great working of Truth, something Umbridge couldn’t, wouldn’t understand, some dire consequence of the actions here: the imposition of Umbridge’s vision, through power and pain and blood. Jane was not afraid of it. Her heart was pure. She felt a grave transfiguration working in her spirit, a shedding of something heavy, a liquefaction, a dissolution of all that she was or knew about herself. She was changing, her thoughts transforming, even as her body had also begun to change, her skin softening and breasts budding under her shirt, unbeknownst to Umbridge, the potions Sirona had taught her to brew slowly taking hold. She even came to accept the basic truth of what she wrote. The woman was the producer of the large gamete, the egg. What she, or the egg, could be also… Jane did not yet know. She knew that Umbridge would not like the result.

“Yes, I think you’re right,” Umbridge said, tapping the page with her wand. “Just the one. Your handwriting has improved.” She frowned a little. “But that’s not the point, is it? You can stop this anytime you want, Mr Thorn.” She placed a hand on Jane’s shoulder. “You know all you have to do is admit that you are lying.”

Jane didn’t reply. She kept her head down. Retorts earned more lines, and she had places to be. Natty hadn’t shown up for classes yesterday, and Jane had an idea of where she might have gone. If she was right, Natty needed her help.

Umbridge frowned further, sympathy slow on her brow. “Well,” she said. “It is almost Christmas.” She sighed, and softened. She seemed to war with herself for a moment.

“We’ll let it go,” she said. She released Jane’s shoulder. “Go on. Hurry back to the castle. It’s cold out.”

Jane rose, and slid her wand up her sleeve. “Thank you, Professor,” she muttered, head down. Umbridge always made her say thank you, at the end of every detention, for releasing her. But this time, in the strangest way, somehow she meant it. Not for the paltry forgiveness of one line, but because she had the strangest feeling that something had changed. Some tide had turned. She glanced back, through her hair, as she swept out the door, and saw Umbridge looking after her, with the strangest expression on her face; something a little too puzzled to be called pity.

to be Continued.